As Hermes once took to his feathers light, When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept, So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright, So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes, And seeing it asleep, so fled away, Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies, Nor unto Tempe, where Jove grieved a day, But to that second circle of sad Hell, Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell Their sorrows,—pale were the sweet lips I saw, Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form I floated with, about that melancholy storm.”[8] The meaning of this dream is sufficiently clear without any light from the fact that the sonnet itself was written in a little volume given by Keats to Miss Brawne, a volume of Taylor & Hessey’s miniature edition of Cary’s Dante, which had remained up to the year 1877 in the possession of that lady’s family.[9] Although the present citation of extant documents does not avail to fix the date of Keats’s passion more nearly than to shew that it almost certainly lies somewhere between the 29th of October and beginning of December, 1818, there can be little doubt that, if a competent person should be permitted to examine all the original documents concerned, the date might be ascertained much more nearly;—that is to say that the particular “first week” of acquaintance in which Keats “wrote himself the vassal” of Miss Brawne, as he says (see page 13), might be identified. But in any case it must be well to bring into juxtaposition these passages bearing upon the subject of the letters now made public. The natural inference from all we know of the matter in hand is that after his brother Tom’s death, Keats’s passion had more time and more temptation to feed upon itself; and that, as an unoccupied man living in the same village with the object of that passion, an avowal followed pretty speedily. It is not surprising that there are no letters to shew for the first half of the year 1819, during which Keats and Miss Brawne probably saw each other constantly, and to judge from the expressions in Letter XI, were in the habit of walking out together. The tone of Letter I is unsuggestive of more than a few weeks’ engagement; but it is impossible, on this alone, to found safely any conclusion whatever. From the date of that letter, the 3rd of July, 1819, we have plainer sailing for awhile: Keats appears to have remained in the Isle of Wight till the 11th or 12th of August, when he and Brown crossed from Cowes to Southampton and proceeded to Winchester. At page 19 we read under the date “9 August,” “This day week we shall move to Winchester”; but in the letter bearing the postmark of the 16th (though dated the 17th) Keats says he has been in Winchester four days; so that the patience of the friends with Shanklin did not hold out for anything like a week.